Knowledge about meningococcal infection and opinion on vaccination of parents whose children attend the kindergartens in Kaunas city

Purpose: Assess the parents' knowledge of meningococcal infection (MI) and the opinion on vaccination. Tasks: Evaluate the parents' knowledge of MI; the opinion on vaccination against MI; compare the knowledge of parents who have vaccinated and not vaccinated children for MI, about the MI and the opinion on vaccination. Methodology: the research was conducted in December 2017 in nine kindergartens in the city of Kaunas. The anonymous questionnaire method was used with the questionnaire the gully designed for this research, which focuses on the parents' knowledge of MI, and the opinion about vaccination. Questionnaires were distributed to all parents of the children. The questionnaires were filled by 377 respondents. The statistical analysis of the data was performed using the SPSS 25.0 software, and the criterion for independence of Chi-square attributes was applied. Differences were considered to be statistically significant when p<0.05. Results: The researched parents were raising 554 children in total, 82.2% were up to 5 years old. Out of 7 questions about MI, most of the parents correctly answered 4─6 questions (67.4%), 25.5% correctly answered 7 questions, and ≤3 questions were correctly answered by 7.2 percent of the respondents. 64.5% of parents believe a vaccine is necessary to fight this infection, and 10.3% believe it is not necessary, 25.2% had no opinion. 39 subjects vaccinated their children from the MI with serogroup B, comprising 10.3% of respondents. Parents who answered all questions about MI correctly, statistically significantly more likely have vaccinated their children against this disease, while the parents who did not answer all the questions correctly, statistically significantly more often did not vaccinated their children, p